ABSTRACT
The killing in the bloodlands took five forms. First, Stalin undertook
modernization
by way of the self-colonization of his Soviet Union. The Soviets created a vast system of labor camps known as the Gulag, collectivized agriculture, and built factories, mines, and canals. When collectivized agriculture led to hunger, this was blamed on particular groups, primarily the Ukrainians. More than five million people starved to death in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, most of them in Soviet Ukraine. The hunger was caused by collective agriculture, but the starvation was caused by politics.
Then the Soviets effected a
retreat
into terror. In the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, the Soviet leadership identified peasants, the victims of collectivization, as the primary threat to Soviet power. People who had survived hunger and the Gulag were shot. At the same time, the Soviet leadership defined certain national minorities as enemies. Nearly seven hundred thousand people were recorded as executed in the Terror, although the true number may be somewhat higher. These people were disproportionately agricultural laborers and Soviet Poles.
In 1939, the Soviets and the Germans invaded Poland together, and carried out a policy of
de-Enlightenment
. Reasoning from different ideologies, but drawing similar conclusions, the Germans and Soviets killed some two hundred thousand Polish citizens between 1939 and 1941, disproportionately the educated people who represented European culture and who might have led resistance. When the Soviets executed the 21,892 Polish officers and others at Katyn and four other sites in spring 1940, they were mirroring a German killing campaign that was going on at the same time. The Soviets and Germans also deported about a million Polish citizens at this time, swelling the Soviet and the German camp systems. The Germans put Polish Jews in ghettos, in the anticipation that they would all be deported. Tens of thousands of Jews died of hunger and disease as the ghettos become improvised labor camps.
After the Germans broke the alliance and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the two enemies killed civilians in a pattern of
belligerent complicity
. In German-occupied Soviet Belarus the Soviets encouraged partisan activity, and the Germans executed more than three hundred thousand people in return. These mass killings had little to do with reprisals in any conventional sense. By the end the Germans were
shooting Belarusian women and children as an encumbrance, and taking the men as slave laborers. In Warsaw, Soviet forces first encouraged a Polish uprising and then watched, without involving themselves, as the Germans killed more than one hundred thousand Poles and then destroyed the city itself.
Hitler imagined a
colonial demodernization
of the Soviet Union and Poland that would take tens of millions of lives. The Nazi leadership envisioned an eastern frontier to be depopulated and deindustrialized, and then remade as the agrarian domain of German masters. This vision had four parts. First, the Soviet state was to collapse after a
lightning victory
in summer 1941, just as the Polish state had in summer 1939, leaving the Germans with complete control over Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, western Russia, and the Caucasus. Second, a
Hunger Plan
would starve to death some thirty million inhabitants of these lands in winter 1941-1942, as food was diverted to Germany and western Europe. Third, the Jews of the Soviet Union who survived the starvation, along with Polish Jews and other Jews under German control, were to be eliminated from Europe in a
Final Solution
. Fourth, a
Generalplan Ost
foresaw the deportation, murder, enslavement, or assimilation of remaining populations, and the resettlement of eastern Europe by German colonists in the years after the victory. Living space for Germans was to be dying space for others.
When the Soviet Union defended itself and no lightning victory could be won, Hitler and the German leadership adapted the three remaining plans to the new situation, killing about ten million people, which was fewer than originally planned. The
Hunger Plan
was abandoned in its original conception, and applied only to areas under total German control. Thus a million people were purposefully starved in besieged Leningrad and more than three million Soviet prisoners of war died of starvation and neglect. As the war continued, the Germans began to use prisoners as forced laborers, rather than allowing most of them to starve. The grand colonial scheme of
Generalplan Ost
could not be implemented without a total victory, which was not forthcoming. It was tried in areas of occupied Poland, where Poles were deported to create space for German racial colonies. Its essential concept was also visible in the German decision to destroy the city of Warsaw physically in response to the uprising of summer 1944. In the cases of both the
Hunger Plan
and
Generalplan Ost
, plans for mass killing had to be scaled back and delayed. The general goal of colonization was never abandoned.
The
Final Solution
, by contrast, was implemented as fully as possible. It was originally to take place after the war. As it became clear in the second half of 1941 that the war was not going according to plan, Hitler made clear that he wanted a Final Solution to be effected immediately. By then, four versions of a Final Solution by deportation had been proposed and found to be impracticable. The invasion of the Soviet Union, and its failure, demonstrated how the Jews could be removed from Europe: by mass murder. Einsatzgruppen originally tasked with eliminating political enemies were used to shoot Jews. Battalions of German Order Police originally tasked with patrolling the conquered Soviet Union were used in massive killing actions. By December 1941,
when Hitler made clear that he expected all of the Jews under German control to be exterminated, a new technique of mass murder was available. Asphyxiation by carbon monoxide, used first in a “euthanasia” program, was adapted for use in gas vans in the occupied Soviet Union, and then in permanent gassing facilities in occupied Poland. To the labor camp at Auschwitz was added a death factory, where hydrogen cyanide rather than carbon monoxide was used as the agent of killing. The Jews of occupied Poland, already gathered into ghettos for deportation, were instead sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Majdanek, and gassed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing is punctuated solitude; the pleasure of finishing a book is acknowledging those who helped it take form.
Krzysztof Michalski and Klaus Nellen of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna forced me to specify the original thought. Thanks to the work-shops organized by the Institute within the project “United Europe/Divided Memory,” I enjoyed the company of several dozen outstanding historians in meetings in Vienna and at Yale University. I drafted the manuscript at Yale, my scholarly home, in the company of colleagues who set very high standards; and then rewrote the book during a stay at the IWM, made productive by the efforts of its staff, especially Susanne Froeschl, Mary Nicklas, and Marie-Therese Porzer. I am appreciative of my sabbatical year from Yale, and especially of the consideration shown by Laura Engelstein as chair of the Department of History. Ian Shapiro and the Macmillan Center at Yale supported my research. The competence and cheer of Marcy Kaufman and Marianne Lyden allowed me to balance administrative duties at Yale with research and teaching.
During the conception and drafting of this book, I had the good fortune to be surrounded by generous and talented graduate students at Yale. Some of them took part in demanding seminars on the subjects of the book, and all of them read draft chapters or discussed the book with me. I appreciate their work, their frankness, their good humor, and their intellectual company. Particular thanks go to Jadwiga Biskupska, Sarah Cameron, Yedida Kanfer, Kathleen Minahan, Claire Morelon, and David Petrucelli. The students and I could not have held our seminars, and I could not have researched this book, without the marvelous collections of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale and the assistance of Tatjana Lorkovic and William Larsh of its Slavic Reading Room. Two outstanding Yale then-undergraduates, Beth Reisfeld and Andrew Koss, also helped me with aspects of the research. I cannot imagine Yale, let alone taking up a project of this sort in New Haven, without Daniel Markovits, Sarah Bilston, Stefanie Markovits, and Ben Polak.
A number of friends and colleagues put down their own work in order to read chapters of mine, to my great benefit. They include Bradley Abrams, Pertti Ahonen, Pavel Barša, Tina Bennett, David Brandenberger, Archie Brown, Christopher Browning, Jeff
Dolven, Ben Frommer, Olivia Judson, Alex Kay, Ben Kiernan, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Mark Mazower, Wolfgang Mueller, Stuart Rachels, Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Will Sulkin, Adam Tooze, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Lynne Viola, and Iryna Vushko. Dieter Pohl and Wendy Lower read considerable portions of the manuscript. Nancy Wingfield kindly read and commented upon an entire draft. So did Marci Shore, who sets an example of humane scholarship that I wish I could match. It goes without saying that readers did not always agree with my interpretations. Critique helped the manuscript enormously; the responsibility for its flaws is mine.
From the beginning of the project to the end, Ray Brandon regularly contributed his superior bibliographic knowledge and vigorous critical spirit. Timothy Garton Ash helped me, at important points, to clarify my purposes. As I was drafting this book, I was speaking weekly with Tony Judt, in connection with another one. This altered my thinking on subjects such as the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. A decade of agreeing and disagreeing with Omer Bartov, Jan Gross, and Norman Naimark in various settings has sharpened my thinking on a host of questions. I have learned much over the years from conversations with Piotr Wandycz, my predecessor at Yale. Teaching a course in east European history at Yale with Ivo Banac broadened my knowledge. I found myself returning to basic problems of Marxism that I first perceived while studying under Mary Gluck (and Chris Mauriello) at Brown and then pursued at Oxford with the late Leszek Kołakowski. I did not continue the study of economics as John Williamson long ago counseled me to do, but I do owe a good deal of whatever economic intuition and knowledge remain to his support. My grand-mother Marianna Snyder talked to me about the Great Depression, and my parents Estel Eugene Snyder and Christine Hadley Snyder helped me to think about agricultural economics. My brothers Philip Snyder and Michael Snyder helped me to frame the introduction.
This book draws from research carried out in a number of archives over the course of many years. A good deal of the thinking also took place in archives. The archivists of the institutions mentioned in the bibliography are owed my thanks. The talk of archives in eastern Europe is often of what is closed; historians know that very much is open, and that we owe our productive work to those who keep it so. This study involved reading in German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, and French as well as English. It required cognizance of debates within the major historiographies, above all the German. I am sure that it would have benefited from literatures that I could not read. The friends who helped me with the languages I do read know who they are, and what I owe them. Special thanks are due to two excellent language teachers, Volodymyr Dibrova and Kurt Krottendorfer. Early on, Mark Garrison and the late Charles William Maynes impressed upon me the importance of learning languages and taking risks. In eastern Europe, Milada Anna Vachudová taught me about some of the overlaps. Stephen Peter Rosen and the late Samuel Huntington encouraged me to keep learning languages and deepening connections with
eastern Europe, and provided the necessary support. It was at Harvard that I became a historian of this region, as opposed to a historian of some of its countries; this book is a pendant to the one that I wrote there.
Sources and inspiration for this book came from many other directions. Karel Berkhoff, Robert Chandler, Martin Dean, and Grzegorz Motyka graciously allowed me to read unpublished work, Dariusz Gawin directed me to forgotten works on the Warsaw Uprising, and Gerald Krieghofer found important press articles. Rafał Wnuk very kindly discussed with me the history of his family. The late Jerzy Giedroyc, Ola Hnatiuk, Jerzy Jedlicki, Kasia Jesień, Ivan Krastev, the late Tomasz Merta, Andrzej Paczkowski, Oxana Shevel, Roman Szporluk, and Andrzej Waśkiewicz helped me to ask some of the right questions. It was very instructive, as always, to think through the maps with Jonathan Wyss and Kelly Sandefer of Beehive Mapping. Steve Wasser-man of Kneerim and Williams helped me with the title and the book project, and offered me an opportunity in a book review to consider some of the issues. I appreciated the work of Chris Arden, Ross Curley, Adam Eaglin, Alex Littlefield, Kay Mariea, Cassie Nelson, and Brandon Proia of Perseus Books. I learned much that was necessary to conceive and write this book from Lara Heimert of Basic Books.
Carl Henrik Fredriksson invited me to give a lecture at the Eurozine conference in Vilnius on the imbalance between the memory and the history of mass killing. Robert Silvers helped me to temper the argument of that lecture in an essay that arose from that lecture, which states the problem that this book attempts to resolve. He and his colleagues at the
New York Review of Books
also published, in 1995, an essay by Norman Davies that drew my attention to some of the shortcomings of previous approaches to the problems treated in this book.
Lectures and seminars at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the Stiftung Genshagen, the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, the Central European Forum in Bratislava, the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Warsaw, the Instytut Batorego in Warsaw, the Einstein Forum in Berlin, the Forum för Levande Historia in Stockholm, the Kreisky Forum in Vienna, Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Birkbeck College London, and the University of Cambridge were welcome opportunities to test conclusions. Presentations generate exchanges: I think in particular of Eric Weitz’s remark about implicit and explicit comparisons, or Nicholas Stargardt’s notion of the economics of catastrophe, or Eric Hobsbawm’s willingness to counsel comparison in London and Berlin.